AUSTIN, Texas — June 27, 2018 – WP Engine, the WordPress digital experience platform, today announced it has acquired StudioPress, creators of the Genesis Framework (“Genesis”), the world’s most popular theme framework for the millions of WordPress sites that comprise 30 percent of the Web. Genesis, and its accompanying suite of themes, helps enterprises, startups, and agencies to accelerate the building of amazing digital experiences. Previously owned by Rainmaker Digital LLC, the acquisition of the StudioPress product line strengthens WP Engine’s WordPress Digital Experience Platform, allowing faster time-to-market with greater ease and agility.

The StudioPress Suite for WordPress

StudioPress is a suite of WordPress solutions that includes:

Genesis – the world’s most popular WordPress theme framework combining design, layouts, SEO, performance, interoperability/modularity and support. It offers important benefits such as allowing brands to switch safely and easily between themes, even when doing so at scale. The framework also allows brands to incorporate new technologies more simply.

StudioPress Themes – a collection of over 60 professionally designed, SEO-optimized, mobile-responsive themes built with Genesis that support a number of vertical use cases.

The Genesis Community

WP Engine’s acquisition of StudioPress further underscores its commitment and investment in the WordPress open source community. It’s thanks to the tireless efforts of this vibrant and devoted community of tens of thousands of Genesis developers around the world that it has become the world’s most popular framework unrivaled in the WordPress space. Some of the most beautiful websites in the world have been created by this community. The upcoming release of Gutenberg promises to bring even more engaging and beloved digital experiences. WP Engine plans to expand support for contributors and the community by providing meaningful opportunities for continued collaboration for the ongoing betterment of the Genesis Framework.

“The Genesis Framework is the world’s favorite way to build breakthrough WordPress sites,” said Heather Brunner, Chairwoman and CEO of WP Engine. “We welcome this incredible community who has contributed to this success and we will invest in its continued expansion. We firmly believe this combination of our engine, the world’s leading digital experience platform, with the Genesis framework will power the next generation of world-class websites for our customers.”

Investment and integration: WP Engine plans to invest in the continued development of the open source Genesis Framework as well as build future solutions that leverage the framework. Further, the Genesis Framework will be integrated tightly into the WP Engine Digital Experience Platform so it performs better here than anywhere else.

Faster, more elegant digital experiences: StudioPress Themes allows WP Engine to offer dozens of highly optimized and responsive themes that look great right out of the box.

Ecosystem expansion: The addition of StudioPress expands WP Engine’s support for third-party plugins and products created to add functionality or support for the use of the Genesis Framework. It also provides additional content in support of the framework and the ecosystem on WP Engine’s publications like Torque and the WP Engine blog.

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About WP Engine

WP Engine is the WordPress digital experience platform that gives companies of all sizes the agility, performance, intelligence, and integrations they need to drive their business forward faster. WP Engine’s combination of tech innovation and an award-winning team of WordPress experts are trusted by over 80,000 companies across 135 countries to provide counsel and support, helping brands create world-class digital experiences. Founded in 2010, WP Engine is headquartered in Austin, Texas, and has offices in San Francisco, California; San Antonio, Texas; London, England; Limerick, Ireland and Brisbane, Australia.

That’s awesome. Congrats. As a web designer/developer and a customer of WP Engine, does this mean that I can use Studio press themes for my clients websites as though I had the Pro Plus plan (https://my.studiopress.com/pro-plus/) ?

Hey Neil. For the most part this is the way you can think about this. We’re planning on surfacing free Genesis / Themes to WP Engine customers this fall, so you’ll have to wait for that benefit, but the approach will pretty much be aligned with ProPlus. We’ll be communicating more about that, as we progress and have more information.

Congrats WP Engine on the acquisition. This is exciting news for the developers at VIEO Design since we are a WP Engine partner and have been developing in Genesis for years! We look forward to the future and all the exciting things that will come from this!

Wait, that is a major miss use of funds and a major distraction from their number one goal. We don’t go to WP Engine for themes, we go them for hosting and security. And sadly enough, they are getting majorly left behind when it comes to server strength, flexible and growth. You use old school servers and with the amazing growth of AWS, Digital Ocean, Googles hosting, then combined with the Cloudways drag and drop controls with that gives 100% fully customizable. Honestly, they should buy Cloudways, one of the new aged control panels that give their customers the VPS flexibility needed. Offering crazy expensive dedicated boxes and have to migrate to upgrade is the ways of the past. And until the fix that problem and get a control and server system that is flexible and allows them to not only be on AWS but also Google servers and Digital ocean, they will be left behind. I have talked with WPengine management about this a year a ago and they understand the issue, but have done nothing grow get out of the 2005 control panels and server technology and pricing. I hope this is small distraction and not a business shift. Because anybody that that has used Studio Press from back with its start understands the lack of flexability, customability, how many have stopped using it because of that problem. Sure they have had growth but nothing compared to Themeforest or other theme website, which was devlopes many many years after Studio press.

Lets hope WPEngines stays focused and start upgrading their control panels, server scalability, pricing model, ability to change data centers, and the ability, move off AWS to google, or digital ocean etc. Google is in the hosting game now, and google and amazon are not friends and they need to start giving their customers the ability to move things around and still have the added value of WP security and customer service they provide.

Hey Eric. Thanks so much for your thoughtful and detailed post. While we’re excited about the opportunity that investing in StudioPress and Genesis represent, our R&D group is still *heavily* focused on evolving and investing in our core platform. It sounds like you have some interesting takes on how that evolution could play out. If you’re open to chatting about this at some point, I would love to get a better understanding of your perspective. DM me on Twitter if you’d like to connect to speak further.. @wpdavidv.

I’m going to have to agree with Eric here. I use and love WP Engine because of their hosting, not because they provide free themes. I also don’t like the inflexible nature of StudioPress and Genesis. I personally never want Genesis as an option on any of my installs, because I’ll have to spend time deleting it. Not that I think WP Engine should go down the theme development path, but a much better option IMHO would have been Elegant Themes and Divi!

Hey Matthew. Don’t worry. We don’t have any plans to auto install Genesis or the StudioPress themes within your site. We will make it easier for customers to discover these products and deploy them, but we won’t force them into your site.

Genesis is the #1 WordPress theme framework on our platform (and in the world), so this was one of the reasons this made sense for us.

That being said, Elegant and Divi are great solutions and we encourage and expect our customers to make the best decision for their business and the experiences they’re trying to create. We will continue to work with all theme providers to help make sure their solutions work well on our platform. We want our customers to have the best experience possible with the solutions that work for them.

Please, please do not even consider the Divi theme as model for Genesis. The thing that makes Genesis great is it simplicity as a framework. Divi has so many options that they have had to add a special search feature called “Divi Quick Access” for users to find where to make adjustments. I don’t need a built in color manager that make “magic color” suggestions, the latest addition which is representative of the many that have come before. The worst thing about all these “helpful” additions is that you can’t turn them off. They are always loaded and at the ready for use.

Hoping you will keep the Genesis framework pure and bloat free, leaving the extras to plugins and child themes. I thought that StudioPress development team’s solution of add a plugin to produce initial Gutenberg compatibility was one of the most thoughtful I have read. They pointed out that plugins are easier to update than themes and in the initial days of Gutenberg that would be a huge advantage to keep up with the inevitable issues that will come up in WordPress. In fact, they said people tended not to like frequent theme updates. Divi puts out almost weekly updates, whether it is a new feature or a fix for something that broke in the last update.

I agree with you Bob. Genesis is what it is because of its minimalism and clean code. I love it like it is.

And, for people that don’t like coding, they can use a good builder with Genesis (like Elementor, for example). That’s a better solution than most of the other themes (and results in a higher performance).

So, when you say “…will be integrated tightly into the WP Engine Digital Experience Platform so it performs better here than anywhere else.”, those of us who are Genisis users will suffer a deficit in performance if we don’t migrate to WPE?

Your experience on other platforms won’t suffer. WP Engine has a team dedicated to helping make sure many WP focused products work well on our platform. We do this by working with the product developer and our platform team on optimizations which help customers using those products on our platform. Of course, the StudioPress products will be part of this effort, but by no means will this be exclusive to SP products. We’ll be working hard to make sure the SP products continue to work well for you on the platforms you choose.

Hey Nathan. You can still get access to support for Genesis / Themes you’ve bought in the past through the SP portal (my.studiopress.com). In addition to making Genesis / SP Themes available to all WPE customers for free in the fall, we’ll be releasing tighter integrations with the WP Engine portal. For now, you can use my.studiopress.com as usual

I have been a customer of both WP Engine and StudioPress for some years. I first started building websites in 2000. StudioPress and WP Engine have been the best combination by far, after trying many hosting and site building options, including FrontPage, Expression Web, XSitePro and around 30 web hosts.

A big thank you for all your help with my web hosting, WP Engine. I love the way it just works and the hassles of times past with other hosts are long gone. One of my favorite aspects is the backup/roll back tool, which has saved me so many times and frees the mind to explore and sometimes even dare.

Congrats to the StudioPress team. I transaction like this has to be a massive validation of all the hard work you’ve put in over the years. My primary concern is what happens with lifetime subscribers, like me, that invested many years ago into the vision.

Are there any plans from WPEngine to change that now or at any point in the future. I had been a customer of WPEngine in the past. The service was great! My biggest drawback was the pricing model so I’m hoping that similar elements aren’t implemented with StudioPress.

A perfect combination. I have loved genesis with the strengths of the schema. Simple customizations with very good themes for blogs. Hope WP Engine will optimize the speed and SEO for it. A question? Does WP Engine create more new themes?

Thanks Sandi! We don’t have any plans to change the pricing of Genesis or the StudioPress themes. We will be looking at ways to make Genesis and the themes more accessible for everyone (could include discounts, bundles, etc.). For WP Engine customers, you’ll get Genesis and the StudioPress themes for free this fall. We’re working hard to make that happen!

Interesting news, seems like a good match, I’m just wondering… I just purchased the StudioPress Pro lifetime package. I have yet to even download a theme for the new sites. We were considering WP engine and mostly others hosting platform. If I was to go for WP Engine did we just waste $500? Would you recommend we try to get a refund? We made an investment in the tech for the long term. Would there be any benefits with regard to other WP engine products for those who made the lifetime investment or will we get the same as any other WP Engine customers? Thanks for your time.

Hey Bojack. Great question! We do plan to offer the StudioPress themes and Genesis for free for WP Engine customers along with all the same support StudioPress customers enjoy today. This would be available while you are a WP Engine customer. If you recently purchased the ProPlus plan, you will get lifetime support, updates, and new StudioPress themes regardless of where you host. In the fall we will be making the StudioPress themes and Genesis available to customers, so if you’d like to wait until then and receive a refund on your recent purchase, please contact StudioPress support through your StudioPress login and we’ll help you out.

As a company that has exclusively used WPEngine and Genesis for years now, this is a pretty great thing. Both great companies and products that we love, and they’re even more tied together now. I’ll pretend it was mostly because of the hundred-plus websites we’ve built and hosted with both that the marriage happened.

Please make more Genesis Child Themes, add more layouts, customizations similar to the Newspaper theme. I Like Genesis themes a lot. But, the Homepages are good for a portfolio site not for a newspaper site.

I currently have the ProPlus plan and I want to make sure I’m not going to need to purchase something additional in order to keep my account the way it is. $500 was a lot to drop all at once to have the ProPlus Plan and I’d hate to see those of us who have it and use it lose out because of the acquisition. What are your plans to ensure that those of us who have already paid into the membership aren’t paying again?

Don’t worry! Your ProPlus plan will continue to include all the same themes and support you’ve always received. Nothing is changing. If you have any specific questions, please let us know. You can submit a support request at my.studiopress.com. Thanks!

I’ve been a customer of both StudioPress and WP Engine for years. Now that StudioPress has been acquired, I hope that WP Engine will address the one, huge gap in StudioPress offerings – making the templates WooCommerce-compatible. Just as the days of HTML, hand-coded, static page websites are over, the days of websites that don’t deal with online storefronts – at least in some form – are drawing to a close. I’d like to see ALL the StudioPress templates get updated to work with the WooCommerce plugin. Hopefully, now that will happen.

From what I’ve read here, it isn’t clear if you are focusing solely on moving Genesis and its associated themes to WP Engine and no longer providing themes to the WordPress community. Currently on the Studiopress site it seems you are attempting to promote your hosting above all else. My question is direct: Will you be supporting and selling Genesis and associated themes for the greater WordPress community for the foreseeable future or is the goal to cannibalize them into a WPEngine only solution? Many of us manage our own cloud instances and don’t need hosting but still love the Studiopress option.

Hey James. This is David Vogelpohl with WP Engine here. I can absolutely verify that Genesis and the StudioPress themes will continue to be made available for use and optimized to run on the platform of your choice. While we strive for WP Engine to continue to be the best place to run Genesis, we know that your platform needs or the needs of your clients vary. Genesis and the StudioPress themes will still work regardless of where you host your WordPress sites!

I have been using WP Engine for more than 3 years, their service and performance is just awesome. After acquiring StudioPress I am pretty sure they will deliver awesome products in the coming days. Congratulations to WP Engine